Now it is one week since I started working with OSM. Sadly, my initial enthusiasm has waned. While there were many nice experiences, above all encountering some helpful fellow mappers, a feeling of meaningful connection with the purpose of the project did not develop.

The apps I used show little consideration for what’s meaningful to the average mapper or end user. The below example from iD may serve as an illustration for how haphazardly it has been decided what gets displayed and what gets hidden. This matters because the UI displays no settings button to override that decision.

… See full entry

Started editing today. Very impressive website! Coming from Wikipedia, much of it is straightforward, but the fact that discussions are attached to individual edits, not to features, takes a bit of a leap.

The tutorial was very good, only gripe is that for tracing the shape of a building they selected one that has a protrusion on the south side, but when one follows the instruction to meticulously enter the shape, it says something like “It looks like you’re having problems tracing the shape” and forces one to completely and scrupulously redo the task – until one figures out that one actually gets punished for being too meticulous! 💢

Also worked with StreetComplete, which is very convenient for the cell phone. My main wishes:

1. Terms such as “surface=sett” should link to the wiki so that one can read the complete explanation, instead of having to guess from one tiny picture.

2. When I mistakenly tagged the wrong building, there was no easy way to undo the mistake. There also was no one-tap way to add some attention mark (such as an exclamation point). So I ended up writing a note, but by the time I got to my PC, I didn’t see that note. Possibly someone else corrected my mistake and deleted the note, but then I would have expected to be informed in some way about that.